Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.
Gene SharpFurther, democratic negotiators, or foreign negotiation specialists accepted to assist in the negotiations, may in a single stroke provide the dictators with the domestic and international legitimacy that they had been previously denied because of their seizure of the state, human rights violations, and brutalities. Without that desperately needed legitimacy, the dictators cannot continue to rule indefinitely.
Gene SharpThe degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.
Gene SharpBy placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority.
Gene SharpNonviolent action involves opposing the opponent's power, including his police and military capacity, not with the weapons chosen by him but by quite different means. Repression by the opponent is used against his own power position in a kind of political "ju-jitsu" and the very sources of his power thus reduced or removed, with the result that his political and military position is seriously weakened or destroyed.
Gene SharpThereโs one thing thatโs been 'learned' maybe from Tunisia and Egypt that I think is a mistake. And that is that the existing ruler has to resign. He doesnโt have to resign. You take all the supports out from under him; he falls. No matter what he wants to do. This is the distinction in the analyses between nonviolent coercion in which he has to resign, but heโs forced into it, and disintegration when the regime simply falls apart. Thereโs nobody left with enough power to resign.
Gene Sharp